Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall, the wife-and-husband producers who have 13 Oscar nominations and an Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award between them, will be honoured at the Oscar Wilde Awards on February 27th at the historic Ebell theater in LA.
The 19th annual event is scheduled for Feb. 27, three days before the Academy Awards, at the historic Ebell theater in Los Angeles. Actors John C. Reilly and Éanna Hardwicke will be saluted as well.
Also new to the lineup is Will Ferrell, who will introduce Reilly and hand him his trophy. The pair, of course, have co-starred in such films as Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006), Step Brothers(2008) and Holmes & Watson (2018).
Created by the US-Ireland Alliance, the Oscar Wilde Awards celebrate the work of those from Ireland — and some who are not — who contribute to film, television and music. (Kennedy, with eight Oscar noms, and Marshall, with five, are Californians born in Berkeley and Glendale, respectively.)
“The Irish are known as being great storytellers, and you can’t find two greater storytellers, in the history of filmmaking, than Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall,” US-Ireland Alliance founder Trina Vargo said in a statement.
In 2018, the couple received the Film Academy’s prestigious Thalberg honor, given to producers whose work “reflect a consistently high quality of motion picture production.”
Kennedy and Marshall met in 1979 when they were working with Steven Spielberg on Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). Shortly thereafter, the trio formed Amblin Entertainment and produced E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Gremlins (1984), The Color Purple (1985), The Goonies(1985), Empire of the Sun (1987), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) and the Back to the Future and Indiana Jones movies.
Kennedy and Marshall, who married in 1987, went on to form The Kennedy/Marshall Co., where from 1991 to 2012 they collected Oscar best picture nominations for The Sixth Sense (1999), Seabiscuit (2003), Munich (2005) and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008).
Their productions also include Signs (2002), War Horse (2011), Lincoln(2012), Sully (2016) and the Jason Bourne flicks.
In 2012, Marshall took over as sole principal of their company when Kennedy became co-chair and then president of Lucasfilm. There, she produced the Star Wars box office behemoths The Force Awakens(2015), Rogue One (2016), The Last Jedi (2017), Solo: A Star Wars Story(2018) and The Rise of Skywalker (2019).
Kennedy recently executive produced The Mandalorian, which launched Disney+; the miniseries The Book of Boba Fett and Obi-Wan Kenobi; the series Ahsoka and Andor; and the 2023 film Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
She’s now producing all Lucasfilm live-action titles in production, including the upcoming second season of Andor and the feature The Mandalorian & Grogu, set to film this year.
Kennedy has produced/executive produced more than 70 movies, which have collectively amassed 25 Oscars from 120 noms. Among them: Poltergeist (1982), Jurassic Park (1993), Schindler’s List (1993), The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) and The Adventures of Tintin (2011).
Marshall has broadened The K/M slate beyond features to include TV, documentaries and Broadway musicals. Those include the Jurassic World franchise; Orson Welles’ final film, The Other Side of the Wind(2018); and the Emmy-nominated docs Sinatra: All or Nothing at All, Laurel Canyon, McCartney, 3,2,1, and The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart.
More recently, he produced the 2022 Tony-winning musical A Strange Loop and the Grammy-winning doc Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story(2022).
Marshall, who also has directed such films as Arachnophobia (1990), Alive (1993), Congo (1995) and Eight Below (2006), is now at work producing this summer’s Jurassic World: Rebirth and directing docs about Fleetwood Mac and Barbra Streisand. He has several Broadway projects in development as well.
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